The Cafe Society

Four Vignettes of Inner-City Life

Like Clockwork

Because the alarm-clock ruled my life for so long, I still set it every working day, just so when it goes off I can flick the switch and go back to sleep. When I eventually do get up and make it to the coffee shop, sometimes it is as early as quarter to eight, sometimes as late as nine-fifteen. That means that sometimes I miss Frank because I get there earlier than he, and sometimes because I get there after he has left. Sometimes I miss him because he doesn't go at all, because he has a client to attend to. I suspect that sometimes I miss him because he lives off the cash he makes from his business, and on some days he simply doesn't have the coffee money.

Frank is just five years younger than I, but time has treated him more kindly. His hair is not yet grey and his face is unlined. Like me he is a tall guy, fair complexion, medium build and with a soft-spoken manner, dressed in a casual style that has not changed much for thirty-odd years. He owns a small terrace not too far from the coffee shop. The top floor he rents out to tenants (one at a time) who are generally women called Amy. However his present tenant is Annabel. I like this alphabetical tenant preference, because on the occasions when they join us (his old tenants seem to retain an attachment to the area and to Frank), it makes their names easy to remember.

The bottom half of the terrace is Frank's workshop, plus a shared kitchen. Frank is a watchmaker, but it is more accurate to say he is in the antiques business. He buys, sells, repairs and maintains old watches and clocks, from the small ones worn on peoples' wrists to the big ones that sit in clock towers in big old public buildings. Most of his family are country folk and he cultivates a somewhat countrified manner and he has the bad teeth that country folk so often seem to have, but he moved to our city at a young age and like me, loves this somewhat bohemian and seedy quarter of it and its often eccentric, weird and occasionally dangerous citizens.

Frank is a man of many stories. Stories about art forgeries, fraud, arson, murder, depravity, insanity and police corruption, and the strange and convoluted histories of the various valuable watches and clocks that have passed through his hands. The stories are usually about our city, and always about people he has known. They are humorous, in spite of their often grim subject-matter, and have an interesting or unexpected twist. They are told with a genuine fondness for the people they concern - be they con-artists, adulterers, professional litigants or the morally depraved, Frank speaks about them with the amused detachment one normally reserves for slightly mischievous children.

Frank also talks about books, usually non-fiction, that he has read, and somehow his telling of them is always more interesting than the books themselves, when he lends them to me and I read them for myself. He is a man with no formal education beyond high school but he has a great love of, and feel for, the English language. It is clear that he composes his stories carefully in his mind before he tells them. Often he forgets he has told me a particular story say, six months before, and tells it again. Sometimes I have forgotten most of it and relish the re-telling, and sometimes I remember it and recognise that certain embellishments have been added. But the factual basis always remains unchanged.

Frank likes my company. I know this because I am told that when he misses me in the mornings he looks rather disconsolate and asks whether I have come and gone already. He tells me he likes my company because I am sane and most of the people he associates with are collectors of watches and clocks, militaria, old cars and other curiosities and therefore by definition insane. When I remind him that he has a block of land in the countryside on the other side of the mountains with about twenty-five MG cars in various stages of restoration, he uses lengthy and convoluted logic in an attempt to demonstrate that he is an exception to his rule.

Actually Frank likes my company because I am a good listener. While he tells his stories he pauses, usually at length, after each sentence while he composes the next perfect sentence in his mind. This makes most listeners impatient. I often imagine him, at the dinner table with his wife, children and the various other family members and miscellaneous individuals who share his house, embarking on a story. Eyes would glaze. His wife would find that she had dishes to wash. His children would find that they have homework to do. One by one they would excuse themselves, leaving Frank, story barely begun, with only the cat watching him intently. And the cat would only be watching him intently because she had not yet eaten, a fact of which she would soon remind him.

I listen to Frank silently and politely for the most part, but sometimes I find it necessary to interrupt to clarify a point, or sometimes I mischievously create a diversion to try and put him off his stride. This always causes him great bafflement. To him, each story is like a perfect, working mechanism and it defies logic that it should prematurely come to a halt. However being a polite man, he deals with each interjection in full, often at length, before resuming his story, always at precisely the place where he left off.

These pleasant interludes usually come to a close in one of two ways. Either a client tracks down Frank at the coffee shop and tells him he should have met him at his workshop ten minutes ago, or I, an inveterate time waster, find that the morning has slipped past to a degree that even for me is a little concerning.

And thus the day begins.

The Ugly Dog

One morning Frank turns up at the coffee shop with a dog. The health regulations say dogs are not allowed inside, so we sit on the sidewalk at one of two tables set out there for smokers and dog-owners who can't bring themselves to leave their pets outside tied to a post while they feast inside.

Frank explains that the dog is his mother-in-law's. She is in hospital and not expected to live. 'What's the dog's name, Frank?' I ask. Frank says her name is Emmie. 'I don't think it is a good name for a dog,' he says, 'but I don't like to change it.' I think the name is OK and convenient. Since the cafe is called 'Effie's', it is an easy name to remember.

As it happens, Frank's mother-in-law survives, and moves in with Frank for a period of recuperation. The dog becomes a fixture, and the footpath becomes our permanent possie for morning coffee. In winter it is a bit chilly, but it has its attractions, because at this time of day there is a steady stream of students walking past from the railway station to the university, and many of them are attractive young women. For connoisseurs of female beauty, like Frank and I, sitting here is a bit like being in an earthly paradise.

Eventually Frank's mother-in-law recovers sufficiently to move back into her own home, but Emmie remains. I tell Frank I am surprised she has so easily transferred allegiance from her former mistress to him. One thinks of a dog's loyalty to its owner as being immutable. He explains that the dog had actually belonged to his father-in-law, who died a few years back. The mother-in-law never really liked the dog much, although she always looked after it and treated it well out of a sense of duty. The dog sensed this lack of love, and that was why she quickly adapted to her new home.

Emmie is not what I would call a pretty dog. She's a little less than knee height on me, with a fairly short coat, white with big black spots. I wouldn't say she's ugly in the face - she's got a normal size snout - not a squashed-up one. She looks like she has a bit of fox terrier in her. Emmie's big problem is that her tail is docked. Not docked to a little stump that still wags, but completely gone. This means that Emmie's main feature, from virtually every angle that you look at her, is her arse-hole, and when she works the muscles that used to wag her tail, which happens reflexively whenever a handsome male dog walks past, her whole hind-quarters sway from side to side, drawing even more attention to the rather ugly orifice at their centre.

It amazes me that in spite of this ugliness, Emmie attracts an enormous amount of attention from the young ladies walking past. Frequently they bend down to pat her, often offering us visions of what Frank likes to call their mammary splendour.

'Frank,' I say in a hushed voice, 'I hate to say it, but Emmie is a bloody ugly dog.' I say it in a hushed voice, because I have an irrational fear that Emmie may hear me and understand, and be deeply offended. 'Why do all those girls want to come and pat her?'

'It's because they feel sorry for her,' he says.

It seems so obvious once he explains it. I'm thinking I will get myself an ugly dog, and set myself up at the next table in competition with Frank.

Can ya spare two dollars

"Can ya spare two dollars for a cuppa coffee Uncle?"

For the past few nights the aboriginal woman has been sleeping rough in the park with two male companions. She's the early riser, already on her feet, rolling herself a cigarette. Her mates are still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

Knowing any cash I give her will end up in her arm I say, "I'll get you a takeaway love."

"Thanks Uncle. Five sugars and can I have a chocolate chip muffin too?"

"What about your mates?"

"Nah all they do is drink beer." But one of them calls out. "I'll have a coffee too please." "How many sugars?" "Four."

I explain that I'll be back after I have my own cuppa - in about twenty minutes.

I have my own cup sitting down at the cafe but I make it a bit quicker than usual because I half expect that when I come back they will be gone and my money wasted, but no, when I get there they are still rolling up their swags and stowing them behind the bushes. I hand over the goodies.

"Thanks Uncle. Can ya spare two dollars?"

Welcome to the Block

Coffee done with for the morning, I start the ten-minute walk to the gym, towel under my arm.

It's an old-style boxing gym, in the upstairs of an old warehouse on the Block, faded photographs of aboriginal sporting heroes of the past around the walls, a ring on one side and the rest filled with cast-off and donated punching bags and gym equipment of various types so that it looks as much like a museum of gym equipment as a working exercise centre.

The guy who runs the place is an Islander with a jungle for a hairstyle that he keeps contained under a West-Indian style tea cosy. His real name is an unpronouncably long Polynesian name, so he calls himself Joe. Joe was a world kick-boxing champion once, but time and arthritis have slowed him down and bones in his elbows and wrists stick out at odd angles. Joe, like me, is an aficionado of the local coffee shops, which is how I met him and how I came to be a member of the gym.

Because I'm certainly the odd man out in the place. The other denizens all come to learn or practice fighting. They are men and women, Kooris, Islanders, Arabs, Indians and people of European descent. Most are on welfare, some are competitive fighters, some are crims who learnt the art in the hard school and want to keep their hand in, some are wannabes and some are just plain crazy, but all of them are super fit and even the guys my age can still do one-handed push-ups. They treat me with a good natured tolerance and for my part I work away on aerobic exercises and weights and try not to be too conspicuous or make excessive eye-contact. Good fighters are beautiful movers and watching their grace and ease as they spar or work the speed ball, or skip so lightly that their feet barely leave the ground, takes the tedium out of my exercise routine.

I walk past the railway station and into the Block, lost in thought, head bowed, until I am pulled up sharp by the shape of an aboriginal boy standing in my path. I move to walk around him but he sidesteps to block me.

"Yaandi?" he asks. Realising his mistake I laugh, and wave my towel in the direction of the gym. He apologises profusely and backtracks to the high brick wall bordering the railway line. Along it is painted a thirty-foot rainbow serpent and at the end, in bold, yellow capitals, the message "Welcome to the Block".

He is on point duty today, directing the traffic from the railway station to his preferred dealers in the drug houses hidden deep in the Block. He thought I was trying to by-pass him and go direct to the source. He offered me the weed but the needle van parked on the other side of the vacant lot says to anyone who doesn't know, and that is no-one, what the real product on offer is.

He doesn't want trouble any more than I do. Trouble frightens off the customers, and his is a business like any other. Business as usual on the Block.